Television
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Fantasy and Escape: Thoughts on Tolkien’s Quest Saga
Instead of watching TV in the evenings this summer, which for lack of energy in my evenings has been the only thing I have felt capable of, I decided to listen to Lord of the Rings and The Silmarilion on Audible. Listening requires less energy than reading, and the narrators are quite good. I was not
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The Failure of Democracy is the Failure of Elites
For all our talk of democracy, it's pretty obvious that the country is run by elites in business, media, and politics. The rest of us get to ratify the general leftish or rightish direction they seem to be going, but the actual power of the people is pretty crude and is in effect plebiscitary. Elite
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Dolly Parton and the Coincidentia Oppositorum
There’s a mesmerizing and ironic artifice to Dolly Parton—a sincere and relatable duality. She’s one of those icons in whom seemingly opposing forces naturally connect: poverty and folksiness against the power of enormous success, vulnerability and tenderness against effervescent self-assuredness, a story of honesty and heartache under an image so artfully plastic it seems to
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HBO’s ‘The Leftovers’: Channeling the Zeitgeist
One of the things that I’ve been thinking about and writing about over the last several years is that while the Age of Faith was supplanted by the Age of Reason, we live in a time now when most thoughtful people no longer believe in reason. Although there are still some dead-enders like Sam Harris, E.
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Stewart v. Maddow
"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we
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Thoughts on “Lost” and “The Divine Comedy”
And so if we’re at all awake, we have this sense of living now at a threshold moment, and the story being told here on Lost projects for us what the stakes are using a technique that interweaves themes from both science and religion, logos and mythos. But at the heart of our story, as…